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Advances in heart surgery at University of Colorado Hospital

A lot of eyes are on what a group of medical professionals are doing at the University of Colorado Hospital–approximately 14,000 sets of eyes, in fact.

The doctors are treating patients with heart valve problems without doing open heart surgery–and they’re demonstrating it via video conference to nearly 14,000 interventional cardiologists at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference in San Francisco.

“This is not open heart surgery–we don’t stop the heart, open the chest, look at the heart and operate on it,” said Dr. John Carroll, an interventional cardiologist at the University of Colorado Hospital. “We come from the inside up, and work on the heart from the inside.

“We do some procedures through the wrist artery, we do other procedures through the artery in the leg–they’re all navigations within the circulation back to the heart.”

The way the specialists see the heart from the inside is what’s special, Carroll said. They use both ultrasound and x-ray technologies to help them work around the heart, without ever having to open up the patient’s chest.

“We’re integrating two forms of medical imaging that have been separate, x-ray imaging and ultrasound imaging,” Carroll said. “We put them together in a way that makes performance of these valve interventions more straightforward.”

Carroll said that one benefit of this procedure is the recovery period is shorter than traditional open heart surgery–the patient can be walking and eating within a few hours. This method isn’t for everyone, he said, but gives patients new options.